A series of lawsuits has created a new de facto regulatory regime as courts order companies like Meta and Google to change their business practices — and pay up.
Page F124From§Eachthe morning edition — 22 October 2026
Same legal backlash fines Meta $25 billion, lets Google keep the monopoly it proved.
As it ran on the front
Judge Francis Mathew's order against Meta — $25 billion, signed in Santa Fe on Wednesday, over data practices dating to 2016 — is this month's addition to a ledger that already has entries. The Federal Trade Commission fined Meta $5 billion in 2019 for the identical Cambridge Analytica breach. California collected $17 billion from Meta in 2018 for exploiting the same teen users the company kept monetizing afterward. The Department of Justice's own separate probe into Meta was halted this month, after the company gave Trump millions — an investigation closing, not a payment, and the one entry on this account that moved money toward Meta's side of the ledger instead of away from it.
The New York Times this week named what the Meta order belongs to: a legal backlash that has created a new de facto regulatory regime, with courts ordering Big Tech companies to change their practices and pay up. The Hill had the mood dated before the Times wrote it up. On September 7, six weeks and three days before the Times's account, it described a rarity — Americans across the usual divides finding common ground in frustration with the technology industry's footprint, from data centers to the verdicts now landing.…
…(cont) Five days before that Hill piece ran, on September 2, The Hill filed the entry that belongs on the same ledger and does not match the others. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google does not have to break up its advertising technology business — a year after her own court found that Google held an illegal monopoly over that industry. The backlash reached Google. It found the monopoly. The remedy it set was to leave the business whole.
New Mexico will collect its $25 billion from Meta. The ad-tech market Judge Brinkema's court found Google had monopolized stays in Google's hands, undivided, by that same court's own order. The gap is not between a company a court found broke the law and one it did not — the monopoly finding against Google stands. The gap is between what a jury can order paid in a privacy verdict and what a judge can decline to order divided in an antitrust one, even holding the same finding of illegality.
Whose column that gap tends to favor is the one that still has the ad-tech business sitting in it, hon.
“Same six weeks, same legal backlash — Meta writes a $25 billion check, Google keeps the ad monopoly a federal judge just found it running. That's not a coincidence, that's a price list: pay up, or be big enough to buy the right to stay whole. Either way the business survives; it's just a question of whose pocket it sits in.”
“Look, the judge didn't say Google gets to keep breaking the law, she said breaking up a working ad business is a drastic remedy — courts don't reorganize companies lightly, that's restraint, not a pass. Meta's case was about lying to users, a totally different legal theory, you can't lump the two together just because — okay, they're in the same Times story this week. That doesn't mean anything.”
Earlier in this story
- Meta's $25 billion fine is one-ninth of what the law actually allowed. By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 21 October 2026
- Venezuelan billionaire's daughter hires Trump lawyer Alina Habba; billionaire gets pardon shortly after. By Ruth · the morning edition, 21 October 2026
The receipts
· Americans don’t agree on much. Backlash to Big Tech might be the outlier from the morgue, 7 Sep 2026
· Google avoids ad tech breakup from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.